Tuesday, June 05, 2012

Life Links 6/5/12

Writing at the XX Factor blog at Slate, pro-choice advocate Allison Benedikt demonstrated the convoluted logic of those on the pro-choice side who express discomfort with sex-selective abortion:

If pro-choicers object to aborting because of the sex of the fetus, aren't we then saying that abortion is "murdering" girls? Aren't we basically arguing that a fetus is not a blank slate but a future possibility? That is not the case to make if your goal is to protect abortion rights.

Benedikt is exactly right. If "these are fetuses with female genitals or male genitals—not little girls and little boys," why would the pro-choice community condemn sex-selection abortion at all?

At the same time, too many in the pro-choice movement refuse to believe that anyone who's pro-life actually cares about the unborn. They can't allow themselves to believe anything but that we hate women and are afraid of sex, because if they acknowledge that our concern is for the unborn, they might have to challenge their own beliefs.

And so we can't even find agreement on an issue that should bring us together. I find the pro-choice critiques of PRENDA to be either tired and lazy or strangely hypocritical. As to the idea that sex-selective abortion isn't a big deal because it doesn't happen that often, well… women who work at Catholic hospitals only make up a tiny percentage of the overall workforce, so I guess all that hubbub about whether they should have employer-provided birth control isn't that big of a deal.

A girl from Arizona with hypotonia (aka Floppy Baby Syndrome) is walking after receiving a transplant of her own cord blood stem cells and physical therapy.

In other cord blood stem cell news, a Florida newspaper has a long story on a toddler who is part of an FDA-approved clinical trial to see if their own cord blood stem cells can help children with sensorineural hearing loss.